Intel Nails Its Feet to the Floor

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No doubt, Intel has experienced an amazing run in the PC business. Through the 80’s and most of the 90’s, Intel enjoyed a uniquely dominant position over the PC platform as the key company that sold the “main brains” of PCs. Sure, the occasional competitor would surface, but until AMD scored big with its Athlon and Duron CPUs, Intel pretty much ruled the roost. In addition, with that dominant position, Intel was also a Wall Street darling, and was a perennial favorite among tech investors. But with the US PC market getting saturated, and no new software (aside from Windows XP) or killer app on the near-term horizon that’s going to eat processor cycles for lunch, Intel (and AMD for that matter) find themselves with high-end processors in search of a mission.

Now for the regulars here at ExtremeTech, we acquire technology for its own sake, and whether we have any rationalization for the purchases is immaterial. Pop quiz: have you ever found yourself saying something like, “But honey, it’s a 1.4GHz Athlon (or 1.8GHz P4), and I can do our home finances on Quicken faster!” as you try to fly yet another hardware purchase under the spousal radar. For the single folks out there, you may want to start developing the spousal rationalization skills now, and thank me later. We buy this stuff for the same reason they climbed Mt. Everest: because it’s there. But for the rest of the world who don’t share The Jones, there’s not much of a reason to get a 1GHz+ CPU for Web surfing, email, and office apps. They just don’t need it.

However, to the extent that games can drive the hardware upgrade cycle, Intel is sabotaging its own efforts. How? Not with its CPUs, but with its chipsets. The 810/815 chipset has proliferated in the computing world in the millions, and while the 815 is a very competent P-III SDRAM chipset, and is in some sense the successor to the trusty 440BX chipset of the P-II/P-III era, its 3D core sucks salmon. In fact, to call it a 3D core is something of an insult to present-day 3D cores the world over.

What lives in the north bridge of many 815 chipsets is an integrated version of the i754 Coloma graphics core, a third-generation refresh of the old i740 Auburn core which is now over three years old. When it first shipped as a Real3D chipset, it was a competent (though not market-leading) 3D core that didn’t make much of an impact on the 3D world. In fact, the i740 was the first and only consumer 3D chip that Real3D/Intel produced for use in graphics boards. Of course, something in the first sentence of this paragraph should have jumped out and bonked you on the head: the basic core is over three years old. In the 3D business, a lot can change in three months, never mind a single year. Now it’s true that Intel’s 3-Way AGP design allows the option of adding a discrete 3D card in the mobo’s AGP slot, which then disabled the 815’s graphics core. And many 815-based systems ship with a card that has at least decent 3D performance that maps well north of the i740/i752/i754. But many more 815 boards are stuffed in low-priced systems where the system maker is looking to squeeze every possible penny of cost out of the box to get it down to a low, low price.

Why should we techie-types give a rat’s keister about all this? Because when game development teams are spec’ing out a new game engine, they have to put a stake in the ground and decide what the baseline minimum system requirement will be for their engine to run decently. And because of the huge number of 815-equipped systems now in the installed base, that platform often has to be considered as the baseline, which drastically lowers the bar as to how much new visual wizardry the game developer can put into their game.

The subsequent ill effect is that most games won’t be pushing the hardware as much as they could, and this reduces the need for gamers to upgrade hardware, including their CPUs. Hence, Intel is effectively shooting itself in the foot before trying to run a marathon. They seem to have figured this out, and have since introduced the 815EP, an 815 chipset minus the underwhelming 3D core. A box based on 815EP will have a 3D card whose performance will most certainly be an improvement over what’s to be found in this integrated core.

Fortunately, there are several game developers out there, like John Carmack, willing to push the hardware by building aggressive feature sets into their games whether the world is ready for them or not. And when the game ships, it drives a round of hardware upgrades so people can get the most out of these latest gaming creations. For as strange as this now sounds, Quake III was the first 3D game to come to market that unconditionally required a hardware 3D accelerator to run the game. And this is despite the fact that the 3D revolution in PCs started over five years ago. Go figure. But not many game development houses have that luxury, and couple that with having to factor in the 815 chipset, and you begin to see where Intel is pouring water on its own fire when it comes time to try and move high-end Pentium 4 chips.

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